[Bf-committers] BIH acceleration structure?

[Joe Eagar]

There was work  to migrate the BIH code from some other app to blender a 
while back by brecht von lommel.  There was issues with it, and he 
didn't have time to deal with them.  I believe the code was taken from 
sunflow.  Anyway, you should talk to him.

For general advice about starting up as a dev (we'd love to have you!) 
you can join #blendercoders on irc.freenode.net, and also there is the 
following page on the wiki:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/New_Dev_Info

Sounds like you'll make a very valuable contributor. :)

Joe

Yves Poissant wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm new here so let me introduce myself. I have 27 years of experience in 
> software development and I worked on different application types basically 
> from accounting applications, to stock management systems, to graphical 
> teletext delivery systems, to natural language based help systems, to 
> autonomous navigation robot systems, to multimedia and game based 
> educational products, to e-learning, to 3D animation system.
>
> 3D programming is not new for me since I've been involved in 3D applications 
> since I started programming, even in the days of vector graphics. I wrote my 
> first renderer in Pascal 20 years ago. I just finished a 3 year contract at 
> Hash Inc programming 3D rendering technologies such as soft shadows, soft 
> reflections, Ambient Occlusion, Image Based Lighting, Photon Mapping, 
> Subsurface Scattering and a few optimizations to the ray-tracing 
> acceleration structure for Animation:Master.
>
> I'm also an artist. I did illustrations and painting, graphics design, 
> comics and animation. I currently have a short animation film project going 
> on and I'm in the character and environment design stage. The project is 
> based on a song from a local artist here and I'm looking for using Blender 
> for that animation project so I've been evaluating Blender for a couple 
> months now.
>
> Some of the render tests I did revealed the common "teapot in the stadium" 
> issue with the octtree acceleraton structure. That is when the scene is 
> large but only a small portion of the scene contains the bulk of the shot, 
> the octtree size must be maxed and the render time increases quite a lot.
>
> I already have a lot of experience (both theoretical and pragmatic) with the 
> different acceleration structures and I would like to try to implement a BIH 
> in Blender. However, I'd like to know if anybody might already be working on 
> such a change before I embark on this project because I would not like to 
> duplicate someone else's efforts. I found an entry in the wiki somewhere 
> where someone from the University of Toronto was working on implementing a 
> BIH but apparently, this never got delivered.
>
> Also, I'm not quite sure what are the custom for such a project. Do I need 
> to submit something and/or does such a project needs to be approved in some 
> way?
>
> Any guidance as to how to proceed, or even a go/no-go advise, would be 
> appreciated.
>
> Regards
> Yves Poissant
> www.ypoart.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>
>